The Driver (1978)

July 28, 1978

Screen: 'Driver' Takes a Rocky Road:No Names, Please!

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: July 28, 1978

HE drives getaway cars, so he's called The Driver. The man who's obsessed with catching The Driver is a member of the police force. He's called The Detective. The young woman who's hired by The Driver to be his alibi when The Detective attempts to frame The Driver is called The Player, probably because when we first see her she's in a gambling casino, playing five-card stud.

There are a lot of other people in "The Driver" (hereafter referred to as The Movie), including phantoms with names like The Connection, Red Plainclothesman, Gold Plainclothesman, Glasses, Teeth and The Kid.

The movie, which opens today at neighborhood theaters, was written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, "Hard Times," with Charles Bronson. This one is not good. It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this.

According to the program notes, Mr. Hill thinks he is getting at "the muscle, the sinew, the tissue, the very nerve center of a getaway driver." It doesn't work, though. By stripping away the individual idiosyncracies, Mr. Hill simply lays bare The Cliché, and The Cliché is Horrendous, if sometimes horrendously funny.

Ryan O'Neal plays The Driver, who is supposed to be to getaway driving what Matisse was to scissors and colored paper. Not so. The Driver always does too much. He's too fancy. He's to getaway driving what Edgar Guest was to poetry. He doesn't know when to stop. Truly.

He couldn't put his car into a parking lot without attracting the attention of the sleepiest traffic cop. All those screaming accelerations, those two-wheel turns and those brake-slammings have less to do with effective getting away than with random self-expresssion. Having no role to act, Mr. O'Neal seems bewildered.

As The Detective, Bruce Dern snarls a lot, more or less repeating the rabbit-toothed psychotic he played in "Black Sunday" and "Coming Home," an unreliable fellow full of distress and possibly an upset stomach. Isabel Adjani, in her first (and possibly last) American film (Hollywood doesn't like a loser) is The Player, a beautiful young woman who means to be mysterious but more often may remind you of the trick-turning Barnard girls in Woody Allen's classic sketch, "The Whore of Mensa."

She wears her mouth turned down at both ends and generally affects the world-weary manner of a jaded complit student who's been through it all — Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Irwin Shaw and Harold Robbins.

For a movie in which there are so many chases. The Movie is singularly unexciting and uninvolving, though it does have its laughs.

I'm fascinated by Mr. Hill's way of emphasizing the peak emotional moment in a scene by having one character talk intently to the back of another character's head. And he must mean us to break up when Miss Adjani, trying to sneak into a busy railroad station to fetch a satchel full of stolen loot, appears wearing a black costume of such arresting style she'd stop the music at Studio 54.

Ronee Blakely, nominated for an Oscar after her fine performance in "Nashville," appears to no particular purpose in the throwaway role of The Connection, The Driver's business agent. She's not great.